A maid with a tray of mugs crossed in front of Gerhard, blocking his path. He stumbled back a step and in that moment I made my decision. I jumped up from my seat and ran to the stairs, careless of the attention I drew. Hot fat spat onto my hand as I passed the fire and I flinched – but my greater fear was meeting Aeneas. I could not bear for him to learn what sort of man he had helped.
I reached the street and ran up a narrow alley towards the cathedral. When I reached the market in the square, I ducked behind a tanner’s stall and doubled back on myself, down a narrow row of shops towards the river. It was almost deserted. If Gerhard had followed me, he would certainly have no difficulty seeing me now.
I came out on a wharf just below the bridge. Few boats dared risk the river that early in the season but, to my shining relief, there was one at the foot of the steps, a small barge whose captain was just casting off the ropes. I skidded to a halt at the edge of the wharf.
‘Where are you going?’ I shouted down.
‘To Aachen, and then to Paris.’
It was not the captain who answered but one of the passengers. He wore a short travelling cloak and a hood, and carried a long walking staff – though if the barge was taking him all the way to Aachen, he would not have to walk a step for weeks. A small knot of men and women stood around him on the bow, all dressed for a pilgrimage.
I glanced nervously over my shoulder. Was Gerhard even now summoning the guard, telling them what manner of criminal they harboured in their city?
‘Can I join you?’
The pilgrim consulted with his companions a moment, then looked at the captain, who shrugged.
‘If you have two silver pennies to contribute to the costs of the journey.’
I scampered down the steps and leaped aboard. I rummaged in my purse and found the two coins – most of what it held. I did not even have a hat with me.
The bargeman gave me a curious look but said nothing. He cast off the ropes and poled the vessel away from the landing, until the current picked it up and began to drive it forward. I sat on the bow with my back to the city and did not look back.
XVII
Kingdom of Iskiard
The inn stood on a wind-blown hill above the great river, tall and crooked like the blasted trees that surrounded it. The sign that hung from its gable swung like a noose in the breeze. In the far distance, the four Castles of the Guardians stood silhouetted against the setting sun, watching over the realm as darkness descended. The lone Wanderer hurried his pace, tapping his staff on the road. He did not want to be abroad after nightfall, when the wargs hunted.
He climbed the stairs and entered the inn, surveying it from the deep shadows of his cloak. The candles had burned low, and the fire in the hearth was no match for the surrounding gloom. Three swordsmen, still in their armour, sat drinking horns of mead and boasting of their deeds. In a corner, two merchants – one a dwarf – muttered and counted coins. Otherwise the hall was empty, apart from from a wench in a low-cut blouse behind the bar. She edged her way to serve him.
‘Prithee, what is thy desire, stranger?’
‘I seek Urthred the Necromancer.’
Her face didn’t move, but the tone of her voice spoke of awe. ‘Urthred keeps to his chamber upstairs. Be warned, stranger: he is fearsomely guarded.’
The Wanderer nodded. He made his way to the twisting stair at the back of the room and climbed: past narrow, barred windows laced with cobwebs, through a wizened door into a dark corridor. Shafts of moonlight tiled the floor through the windows; at the far end, a blue skein blazed and crackled in front of another door.
The Wanderer took a step towards it, then halted. Had he heard something?
‘Ni-yargh!’ A figure came charging out of the shadows. The Wanderer just had time to glimpse a hooked nose and savage fangs, the gleam of a sword in the moonlight. But the Wanderer was the hero of a thousand battles in this land. He stepped to one side and tilted his staff like a lance, straight into his assailant’s body. The goblin flailed back, off balance; the Wanderer stepped forward, swung the staff around and with two swift blows dispatched him.
‘Who trespasses in the Necromancer’s abode?’ The voice came out of nowhere, echoing in his ears. The threads of light at the end of the passage pulsed like the strings of a harp.
‘Nicholas the Wanderer.’ He pulled back the sleeve of his cloak to show the mark of the Brethren seared onto his wrist. ‘In the name of Farang, let me pass.’
The glowing tendrils pulled away. The door swung in noiselessly. The Wanderer stepped through.
The room beyond was a dim stone chamber, lit only by moonlight and a pair of naphtha torches bracketed to the wall. The ceiling above was so high that the rafters, where bats roosted, were almost invisible. Magickal and alchemickal apparatus filled the corners of the room – siphons, flasks, jars of dragons’ bane and unicorns’ mane. And behind a stone table, staring at his uninvited guest, an old man with piercing eyes and a straggly grey cloak, a silver circlet enclosing his long white hair. Urthred the Necromancer.
‘Nicholas the Wanderer. Many moons has it been ere you crossed the threshold of these lands.’
‘Sorry,’ said Nick. ‘I’ve been kind of busy.’
Urthred’s face stayed expressionless, but Nick knew he didn’t like the irreverence.
‘Listen, I’m sorry I don’t have time for the formalities. I need to talk to you.’
‘Then why didn’t you pick up the phone? This isn’t a chat room.’
‘I didn’t want to be traceable.’
Urthred sighed. ‘Job making you paranoid again?’
‘My room-mate was murdered last night.’
It was unnerving to say it to the avatar, to look for shock or sympathy in the digitally drawn face and see nothing. Its blank eyes just stared at him.
‘Shit, man, I’m sorry.’ Urthred’s portentously Anglicised voice was gone, replaced by the Midwestern twang that, somewhere in Chicago, belonged to a geek named Randall. ‘How did it happen?’
Nick told him, starting with Gillian’s message. He added in what he’d learned about the card. ‘If it’s real, it’s worth something. But it could just be a fake.’
‘Want me to take a look at it?’
‘Please.’
In the Necromancer’s chamber, the Wanderer reached inside his cloak and pulled out what looked like a giant marble, a glass globe filled with swirling coloured mists. He handed it to Urthred, who placed it in a rack on the wall with other, similar spheres. Somewhere on a server farm in Oregon or China, a file copied itself from Nick’s account to Randall’s.
‘I’ll just run it through.’
Randall’s avatar went still as he dropped offline. After a few seconds, the Necromancer began to shuffle on the spot and swing his arms, a sort of human screensaver. It was odd, Nick thought, how although nothing had changed on screen, the mere knowledge that Randall wasn’t looking out of that rendered face made him feel alone in the imaginary room. Even odder, he supposed, since he’d never seen Randall in the flesh.
They’d met at an online conference a couple of years back, both participants in a Web symposium. Randall had just made a name for himself by convincing a judge that a tabloid photo of a supermodel entering rehab was actually a fake. The supermodel had received an undisclosed sum from the newspapers; Randall had earned a reputation as one of the smartest researchers in the field. Informed rumour had it he’d also taken a juicy cut of the damages. Scurrilous rumour added he’d enjoyed a more personal thank-you from his grateful client.
‘The reliability of digital evidence is one of the biggest challenges for law enforcement in the twenty-first century,’ he’d told the conference. ‘With a fifty-dollar camera and a PC, there’s almost nothing that can’t be faked. But there is hope. The moment you change a digital image, you leave fingerprints on it. It’s almost impossible to combine two pictures realistically without rotating or resizing something. Those are mathematical manipulations, and they make marks in the data like ripples when you toss a rock in a pond. If you could measure all the ripples, their height and wavelength and velocity, you could work backwards to figure out where the rock went in and how big it was. This is the same idea.’